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The childhood imagination reigns supreme in the Stratford Festival’s production of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Lewis Carroll’s story loses nothing in the translation from James Reaney’s adaptation to director Jillian Keiley’s vision.

Though less-well known than Alice in Wonderland, it’s no less magical.

Once we slip through the looking glass and land on that chess board nothing is impossible as Alice finds her way to becoming queen in 11 moves.

Keiley really embraces the wide-open world of imagination and so does designer Bretta Gerecke and the props department.

Magnificent bicycles with welded metal flowers and trees are wheeled around the stage by a group of Alices. But because they are on the other side of the looking glass, they are her opposites—instead of blond hair they have brown and instead of a white dress with blue pattern, they wear blue with white and so on. The men dressed as Alice still move like men, for the most part, adding to the strangeness of the scene.

A wise-cracking gnat (Elliott Loran), a slow-moving Hare (Tom McCamus) with ears askew and a crusty Humpty Dumpty (Brian Tree) with enormous arms are some of the strange characters that leave a lasting impression.

Tweedledee (Sanjay Talwar) and Tweedledum (Mike Nadajewski) are great fun as they bounce off each other and hover around Alice.

The Red Queen (Cynthia Dale) could walk straight into the world of Dr. Seuss with her gravity-defying, sideways hair. The White Queen (Sarah Orenstein) is mesmerizing with a birdcage and a mini-pot of jam balanced precariously on her head. Both performances are terrific fun.

Trish Lindstrom’s Alice is our guide into the crazy world of invention. She’s fully engrossed, of course, but every once in a while looks to us to make sure we’re still with her.

We could be nowhere else.

This is a show that can compete with any 3-D Disney movie out there.

It’s one thing, especially when you’re “7 1/2 exactly," to see images of 3-D jelly beans come toward you in a movie theatre. It’s another to experience a jelly bean rainstorm.

That’s one of many fantastic ways in which Keiley takes hi-tech kids out of a CG world and places them inside the imagination of a child who starts out with little more than a knitted cat for amusement.

Any adult who was an only child or spent a lot of time in trouble, should easily be able to leave logic at the door and travel back through the decades and into the backward world of Alice.